Object store specialist packs nearly a TB into 4U of rackspace in appliances with S3 and file access aimed at service providers, media and video surveillance use cases

Cloudian has launched a capacity-heavy 4U format version of its Hyperstore object storage appliance. The product aims to offer greater density with boxes that hold spinning disk of up to 960TB of capacity for customers in secondary storage use cases, such as backup and archiving.

The Hyperstore 4000 is an object storage appliance that offers access via Amazon S3 protocols with connectivity to hosts also possible via a file-access NFS gateway.

It comes in above the supplier’s Hyperstore 1500, which is a 1U appliance. Hyperstore is also available as a software-only product and can be downloaded from AWS, in which case the customer only pays for capacity used.

“We found that people were looking for capacity,” said Cloudian chief marketing officerJon Toor. “Where people had been buying significant numbers of the 1U box [Hyperstore 1500], we decided to offer greater density.”

Cloudian claims the cost is comparable to off-site cloud storage, at 0.5c per GB per month.

The Hyperstore product replaced the FL series, which allowed capacity and processing to be scaled independently. Hyperstore boxes are pre-configured with central processing unit performance appropriate to capacity, said Toor.

Replication is asynchronous, or synchronous if network latency allows.

Key customer use cases for Cloudian object storage are for service providers that want to offer S3-compatible storage services; data protection, where Cloudian is used a backup target either in-house or as a service, and; as archives for media, entertainment and video surveillance.

“In broadcast, they’re still using a lot of tape that they need to get away from, and we find customers want to use object storage as an active archive,” said Toor.

Multi-tenancy functionality

Cloudian is object storage based on the Apache Cassandra open source distributed database. It has multi-tenancy functionality that allows access to many users while looking like their own domain.

Object storage is an emerging method of data retention. It doesn’t aim to compete with the highest performance block and file storage methods, but is well suited to large volumes of unstructured and – in some cases, such as with Cloudian – structured data.

In place of the traditional tree-like file system, structure object storage uses a flat structure, with files given unique identifiers something like the DNS on the internet.

Like most object storage products, Cloudian uses erasure coding for data protection, which makes multiple (often three) copies of data and distributes it across locations. Should any one portion of the data fail, it can be reconstructed from information held elsewhere in the system. Asynchronous and synchronous replication are also options for data protection.

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